Integrate Dialogflow chatbot with Skype channel
There are many communication platforms available today to integrate your chatbot with: Skype, whats app, slack, Facebook messenger, twitter...etc. Dialogflow offers you the option of integrating your chatbot with many of these channels, which is a huge boost for promoting your chatbot and make it reachable by a wider audience.
In this article I will show you how to integrate with skype the chatbot we built in a previous article: Build a chatbot using C# and Dialogflow
Setup Dialogflow integration
Open Dialogflow console and select your agent (in our case it will be the HotelBookingBot) and click on Integrations menu item and select the Skype option. As you can see the popup window will list the steps needed to integrate with Skype, but we will also walk through it here.
Create a bot in Microsoft Bot Framework.
As the first step is telling: Create a new bot in the Microsoft Bot Framework so let’s do that.
- Open the MS Microsoft Bot Framework (keep both tabs of Dialogflow and MS bot framework open it will be some back and forth between) and click sign in, you need an MS account and you can create new one of course.
- After successful sign in you should land on Bot profile where you have to fill the form with details around your bot like: Display Name. Fill in your Bot Handle field with a name that will define your bot as per documentation:
A bot handle represents a bot’s registration with the online Azure Bot Service. This registration is associated with an HTTP webhook endpoint and registrations with channels.
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I gave it a handle name as: hotelbookingbot12 (this name is unique across the bot framework so you will have to choose another name for you)
Go ahead to the configuration section and fill the Messaging endpoint field by copying the Request URL value from Dialogflow console as below:
3. As you can see the above form is expecting Microsoft App ID and Password, to get these two values, go back to the Bot Profile page and click on Create Microsoft App ID and Password button:
You might be asked to sign, then on the landing page of Azure portal click New Registration:
Fill the name and select the last Supported account types option since we used a personal account:
Once it’s created you will see now the Application (client) ID that we need for the Dialogflow integration, copy the value and paste it in the Dialogflow console under: Microsoft App ID field.
We still need the password, click on Certificates & secrets menu item on the left the press the New client secret button.
Copy that value to the Dialogflow under Microsoft App Password field and save it in a secure place in case you want to use it later.
4. Continue filling the fields by populating on the MS Bot Registration page and pass your App ID also in the below field:
We not filling any of the analytics fields for now, so you can skip.
Last step on this page is to fill the owner field with your email account and accept the terms then click Register. If everything is OK you will a Bot Created message.
5. Now go back the Dialogflow screen and make sure all field are populated with the related info generated above and click the Start button.
Test the bot in Skype
- Go to MS bot framework portal and click on the my My Bots menu item you should see the bot HotelBookingBot listed as below:
2. Click the HotelBookingBot then click on the Skype option and click Add to Contacts, that will add your bot to your contacts list on Skype, make sure you have Skype installed and you signed in. Also if you received the below popup you can open Skype via:
And here we go, the below message is coming from Dialogflow api:
Type a message to make sure that your bot gets replies from the webhook we created in this article: Create a C# .netcore webhook for a Dialogflow chatbot:
Publish your bot
To be able to commercialize your chatbot you have to Publish it, the publish is about reviewing your chat bot for the certification checklist used by Microsoft and Skype to validate Skype bots submitted for certification. This is not a mandatory step during development, only once you ready to take your chatbot to the public you can proceed with.
Go to your bots list on the MS bot framework portal and click the Edit link next to your bot:
Then click the Publish tab to fill the details then click Submit for Review button.
In this article I showed you how to integrate your bot with Skype, I would also encourage you to go ahead and try to integrate it with another channel like whats app for example, good luck!
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